_________________“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

Even if that's true, it is interesting that the pollsters underestimated the "populist" movement each time.

In this case, they actually overestimated it, as has been common for right-wing populist parties in Europe (the 538 article gives some other examples). It's interesting, therefore, that they underestimated the support for both Brexit and Trump.

Joined: Fri Mar 17, 2006 9:59 amPosts: 4594Location: The other side of Michigan

Túrin Turambar wrote:

538 has an article on this exact topic - they share Dave_LF's assessment that the gap between the actual result and the final aggregated polls was about ten points

It's more that I share their opinion, if we're going to be honest :

Quote:

The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss....The previous largest error, 8.4 percentage points, occurred in 2002, when just a single public poll was conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign. This year, 18 surveys were conducted during the same period. Not one of them had Macron winning by as large a margin as he won by.

They go on to point out that if you only consider polls from May, the miss becomes a slightly better 8.1 points.

Although LePen did not win, it did come down to two candidates who were both outside the mainstream political flow in France. There is a pretty strong anti-establishment trend going on around the western world right now, at the same time that the leadership of the western world seems to be failing at the job. They over-estimated in that LePen did not win, the under-estimated in that an outsider did win and LePen made it into the top two.

Personally, although I do not care for her at all, I was hoping to see LePen win for the entertainment value.

_________________"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams

When the result was announced, I speculated how Macron would govern as an independent with a legislature dominated by the mainstream parties. But in a development that is, I think, more surprising than Macron's original victory, his party and its allies have won a sizeable absolute majority in the Assembly.

Given that Macron's Party didn't exist two years ago and France has had a relatively-stable two-party system since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in the 1960s (interrupted by the National Front) it seems hard to me to overstate just how massive this is. It'd be like the leader of a third party which hasn't even been founded yet winning the 2020 U.S. Presidential election along with over 300 seats in the House of Representatives.

It's also interesting that, in spite of the narrative of voters going for more and more extreme options, the French electorate has moved decisively to the centre. The National Front and Unsubmissive France, for the hopes of their leaders, fared fairly poorly.

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